Give the Speaker a Break

I worked on Capitol Hill for nearly 19 years -- all of it on the Senate side of the Hill -- and it was generally known among Senate staff that the CIA altered its briefings to members depending on who was receiving the briefing.

The CIA often found excuses NOT to brief certain members of Congress at all for fear of seeing the information in the newspaper the next morning.

Some members, for the same reason, were given only partial information at briefings.

Some members of Congress may have been intentionally mislead on occasion.

And, of course, some members were briefed completely, accurately and honestly because the CIA trusted those members to use the information supplied properly.

So this business of saying, as Newt Gingrich did last night that "The CIA is prohibited by law from lying to Congress, and thus would never do that" is ridiculous -- and Newt knows it.

I have my own view of what Speaker Pelosi might have been told but it is not relevant so I won't offer it here. What is relevant is that the facts have not changed: Torture is illegal and the Bush/Cheney Administration authorized it it. It makes no difference what the CIA told or did not tell Speaker Pelosi. Soon the focus will return where it rightfully belongs -- not on the people who wrote the justifying memos, rather on the people who made the decision to torture in the first place.

And even if there is no prosecution of these individuals, history will "prosecute" by recording the truth for future generations to read and not repeat.